AALS Section on Professional Responsibility honors Professor Joe

The Association of American Law Schools’ Section on Professional Responsibility has recognized Professor Irene Oritseweyinmi Joe for outstanding achievement. 

During a Jan. 5 virtual awards ceremony, Joe was honored by the selection committee for the 2021 Fred C. Zacharias Memorial Prize for Scholarship, along with Noah Rosenblum of New York University School of Law. The committee based Joe’s honor on her 2020 UC Davis Law Review article “Regulating Mass Prosecution.”

“I am really excited, honored and humbled to know that my project inspired this kind of appreciation,” Joe said. “It  makes me feel like my idea is part of the conversation, which was really my entire goal for creating the project and putting it out there.”

In “Regulating Mass Prosecution,” Joe, a former New Orleans public defender, argues that requiring prosecutors to comply with existing ethical rules that govern all lawyers could help mitigate public defender case overload, and the mass incarceration to which it contributes.

“The rules say that one attorney should not engage in behavior that would make another attorney violate ethical rules,” Joe said. “My paper shines a light on the fact that when prosecutors bring so many cases that the public defender is overwhelmed, they’re doing exactly that. The prosecutors are compromising their own adherence to the relevant professional rules by putting the public defender, another attorney, in a position where they might compromise their own.”

The paper has been recognized elsewhere in legal academic circles. Joe said she was excited to see Scott Cummings, the Robert Henigson Professor of Legal Ethics at UCLA, write about her article in Jotwell in November 2020. Cummings, Joe said, was “an amazing mentor" at UCLA Law, where she once was a fellow.

Cummings writes in the Jotwell piece that “in this moment of political uprising and calls for transformative change, Joe’s analysis provides a clarion call for major reform.”

Joe’s scholarship focuses on the ethics of criminal justice. She graduated with honors from the University of Texas at Austin, and earned her J.D. from Stanford Law School. She clerked for the Honorable Napoleon Jones of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California.

Professor Emeritus Ed Imwinkelried also was recognized at the Jan. 5 AALS ceremony, with the Section on Evidence’s Wigmore Lifetime Achievement Award.

 

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